Two or three looks, a couple of gestures, and Freedom had Twelve and Thirty-one flanking either side of the intersection. Sections Twenty-two and Thirty-three dropped back to watch our rear. The Humvees were about fifty yards behind us now. Section Twenty-one moved forward towards the baker’s dozen of exes.
By now, most of us knew how strong and fast we are. There was a period of broken doorknobs, torn shirts, and lots and lots of snapped bootlaces. We went through bootlaces like you wouldn’t believe. But that was long past. Section Twenty-one flitted across the open space and eliminated the exes. They grabbed skulls, twisted, and moved on to the next one before any of the dead guys could raise their arms. You can only get two or three that way, but six people doing two or three each is a lot of damage in less than ten seconds. Not one shot fired.
The last ex hit the pavement and Twenty-one leaped up into the air one by one like it was the most natural thing in the world. A fifteen foot vertical jump. They came down on top of the semi.
“Oh, screw me,” said Taylor. We could hear him forty feet away. He didn’t say “screw.” I see no need to use his exact phrase, even in an informal report.
A voice crackled over my radio. Sergeant Harrison, Twenty-one’s leader. “Unbreakable Seven,” he said. “This is Unbreakable Twenty-one.”
“Unbreakable Twenty-one, this is Seven,” I answered.
“Seven, this is Twenty-one. Six is going to want to take a look at this, sir.”
Captain Freedom took three steps and leaped into the air. Thirty-five feet from pretty much standing still, the magnificent bastard. I had to run more, but I ended up landing on the semi just after him. The rest of Eleven was right behind me.
A sea of dead things. I’d read that phrase in a few reports. Once in a book someone loaned me at the start of the outbreaks, some horror-sci-fi thing about the Grim Reaper hunting zombies. It always struck me as a crap phrase. Something people said to avoid being exact. I’d dealt with hundreds of soldiers in boot camp and never had trouble keeping them separate. I’d been at ceremonies with over two thousand men and women present and it never seemed like a sea.
There was a frigging ocean of dead things on the other side of the pileup. It’s one thing to read reports about the walking dead, to hear how many of them there were. Seeing it is like getting dropped in ice water. Seven, maybe eight thousand exes. Maybe more. After one of the first briefings we attended together, Freedom told me the human mind can’t comprehend numbers over one hundred. As the previous paragraph might indicate, at the time I thought it was bullcrap. Now I’m not so sure.
They’d been drawn this way by the sound of our engines and our weapons, stumbling in our direction for an hour now from all over the city. The semi across the road was acting like a floodgate. They just piled up against it, stretching back a mile down the double-wide road. I couldn’t see pavement anywhere. The chattering from their teeth was like static. It went on and on and you knew it wasn’t ever going to end. It just hung in the air like flies over garbage.
The ones closest to the semi saw us and surged forward. They clawed at the sides of the box. Most of them still looked like people. I saw one that looked like it’d been set on fire. I couldn’t tell if it’d been a man or a woman. Another one looked like its arm had been shot off. There was a woman with dark hair like my sister. Her jaw had been blown off. There were strings of muscle and skin hanging off her upper teeth. The strings twitched as the dead woman tried to clack her missing teeth together.
“Screw me,” Taylor said again. “Screw me.”
“Shut it right now, specialist,” I snapped.
“Yes, sir.” He stopped making noise but his lips kept moving.
Right there. Taylor was an arrogant jackass but he knew to keep his mouth shut when told to. Seeing all these things was throwing him. Heck, it was throwing me. I should’ve said something.
A message came in from Twelve. Enough of the exes were making it around the pile of cars that they needed to take action. Freedom gave the word and I relayed. There was a roar as Twelve’s Bravos cut down the dead things. Section Thirty-one joined in a moment later.
It was gas on a fire. More exes started staggering toward the sound. By the time the echo of the gunshots faded another three dozen, easy, had made it through the maze of cars. They were finding their way just by raw numbers.
“Wait here,” said Freedom.
A few quick steps along the roof of the semi and he launched himself over to the roof of the Circle K, another five or ten feet up. Some of the exes in the crowd shifted to follow him through the air. They clawed the front of the store. One of them fell through a broken window into the building.